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James Dalessandro Interview

James
Dalessandro discusses 1906,
a novel set in San Francisco at the time of the great
earthquake and fire.

1906 is a
work of fiction based largely on fact. It portrays a
city on the eve of the earthquake bathed in wealth
but rife with corruption. Dalessandro sat down to
discuss 1906 prior to a public event at Book
Passage on April 23, 2004.

Dalessandro
writes in the voice of Annalisa Passarelli, a young reporter
who secretly helps the police uncover graft and
bribery at the highest levels. After the
detective whom she is informing dies under
mysterious circumstances, she joins forces with
the detective's son Hunter. They grow fond of
each other, and together they strive to expose criminality.
Success is close at hand, but then the earthquake
intervenes.

Suddenly
matters of survival are paramount. A series of fires
devours large portions of the city. People from all walks
of life are thrown together, seeking safety wherever
they can find it. I asked Dalessandro about one
of those scenes.

Grant
Howard: I got the sense from the book that
every scene was based on fairly meticulous
research. For example, that scene in Golden
Gate Park where people are just lying there on
the grass with all of their personal
belongings. Was that based on facts?

James
Dalessandro: Thank you for
noticing that. You are first person who did.
(Italian opera singer) Enrico Caruso and the
young lady who became his escort--that
actually is based on fact. A young woman found Enrico
Caruso wandering through Golden Gate Park. He actually
slept the night in Golden Gate Park, next to a young
woman who befriended him--because he was all
alone, he was separated.

So
the description as the sun comes up, of all the people
with all their belongings--I sort of pieced
that together from letters and observations.
That was a lot of research. I used some of my
imagination, too. But I did know that people
tore the bathtubs out of their houses and put
roller skates under the bottom, and filled the bathtubs
full of their most prized possessions. So I just asked
myself, what would be the most prized possessions. And
then I read things like, people saved their
favorite skillet, people saved their grandfather
clocks. A big thing was saving their pets. Dogs
and cats were very popular. So when the crowd
went up, you had literally thousands if not tens
of thousands of people spread out through
Golden Gate Park, and probably a couple of thousand
animals.

GH:
I also got a sense that you did a lot of research about
what it was like in San Francisco on the eve of
the earthquake. Very early in the book, in the
voice of one of the lead characters Annalisa,
she says it was "part Paris and part Dodge
City". And I definitely got that paradox. On one
hand, you have people going to the opera and
hanging on every word. And then you have these toughs
and thugs and fistfights on the Barbary Coast. Was that
something that you were trying to evoke, that contrast?

Dalessandro:
Yes, absolutely. Someone asked me recently to describe
the city. I used the line, it was part Paris and part
Dodge City. I have never been able to come up with a
better description than that. It was urbane and
sophisticated. The people were amazingly
well-dressed. It was a very fashionable city. It
had two opera houses. And Market Street was
like Paris. Market Street was patterned after
Bouevard St. Germain in Paris.

And
yet you had the Barbary Coast and fistfights. On the
day before the earthquake, the San Francisco Police rescued
a 14-year-old boy from being shanghaied. I use that
little story. Everything that I could use that
was factual and real in the novel, I used it.

Some of the improbable events or some of the
pulp-fiction-like events--that stuff actually
happened. I mean, there were shootouts between
cops and shanghaiers. There was a bouncer on the
Barbary Coast named The Whale--a shangaier who
also was a bouncer at a bar--who liked to get people
in bear hugs and bite their noses off. And he had 20
of them or so stashed under a glass on a bar, with the
dates and the places--like, "corner of Battery and
Jackson"--where he bit these people's noses off.
I mean, I fabricated very little. As close as I
could get it, that's what it was like.

GH:
Corruption is one of the themes of the book. I
guess that was also true to life. I think you
changed the name of the City Attorney.

Dalessandro:
Political boss, yes.

GH:
It looked like you condensed a lot of corruption within
those two or three days that probably happened
over a longer period.

Dalessandro:
Well, two things. First of all, I think that's what a
lot of novelists do; you compress time. Things that happened
afterward and things that happened before--yes I
compressed them. But again, it was a thread
that ran through it. When my characters are
looking in the logbook, the ledger, of Abe
Rouf--the character I call Adam Rolf--reciting a
litany of all the bribes. Those bribes had taken place
over months and months and years and years. But every
one of those bribes described in that ledger was actually
based on fact.

A
man named Walter Bean wrote a book, I think published
in 1934, called "Abe Rouf's San Francisco".
And he had all the documents and all the records from
the trial. And all that stuff was true. Abe Rouf actually
made a complete confession, and detailed all the
bribes and all the shenanigans. All that stuff
is very, very factual. But again, even though it
wasn't all happening on that particular day,
the threads still ran through that day. And a
lot of those things were coming to a head at
that particular time.

GH:
And there really was a federal investigator, a federal
prosecutor appointed by (Theodore) Roosevelt?

Dalessandro:
Fremont Older, who was the crusading editor of the Evening
Bulletin.

GH:
And that's a real person?

Dalessandro:
Real person. He went to the White House in 1905 in the
spring and asked Theodore Roosevelt to back a corruption
probe. And Roosevelt said, "We have no money." And
Fremont Older said, "I will get the money from
someone." And he got $100,000 from Rudolph
Spreckels, the youngest son of Klaus Spreckels,
the sugar magnate.

And
Roosevelt sent the greatest investigator, a man named
Burns, from the Secret Service Department--the greatest
detective in America and the most ambitious
prosecutor--his real name was Francis Haney. Abe
Rouf's goons did try to kill Francis Haney. It
wasn't until after the earthquake and after a
trial began, a goon shot Francis Haney in the
face in a courtroom during an intermission. His favorite
way of getting rid of his enemies was dynamiting their
houses.

So I
changed Haney's name, and I moved the events a little
bit forward. And I showed them striking back at their
enemies, because I couldn't continue the story to a year
later. So I just compressed time a little bit. Some
of that stuff will become clear. I hope to do a
continuation of this book called "1906: The
Aftermath." The trial is just as sensational as
the earthquake.

GH:
One of the main characters, Hunter, becomes (Annalisa's)
romantic interest. And they are both fresh out
of college. And he decides to follow in the
footsteps of his father and be a detective. Do
you think it is fair to say that there is a
theme, in terms of his character, of trying not
only to avenge the death of his father--which happens
fairly early in the book--but even of trying to measure
up? Several times in the book people say, "Oh, your
father was a great man." And it is like he is trying
to measure up to that. Is that a fair statement?

Dalessandro:
I never really thought about that. I guess maybe a lot
of sons try to measure up to their fathers. I looked
up to my father when I was young--not so much so when
I got older. I think he is just enamored of his
father--his honesty and integrity. It is
something that was bred into him very young, and
he just feels it's the noble and right thing to
do to sort of follow in his father's footsteps.

And
of all the members of his family, of all of the Fallon
clan, he is probably the most qualified for the job--because
he is the smartest and the most resourceful. He is
the one that wants to bring scientific
techniques into the department. I started doing
all that before this fascination with these
television shows like "CSI" and "CSI Miami".

GH:
"Law and Order"?

Dalessandro: "Law
and Order". Well, they don't do as much scientific
analysis. But Hunter's stock in trade is, he uses
scientific analysis, photographs and crime scene
analysis. And he also was a big fan of Sherlock
Holmes. And he says in the book, it was just
logic, it was just a question of observation.
And then also, Darwin wrote an incredible book
called "Emotion in Man and Animals," which he
would have studied in his science and anthropology
classes. And Darwin believed that you could use the human
face as a sort of lie detector. So he uses that, too.
He is able to read people's faces.

There
is a professor at San Francisco State who
believes that reading people's faces is one of
the great skills that could actually replace the
lie detector. And I didn't find that out until
later, until I was well into the book. It's
funny. As I started to create some of the
characters, I would then find factual things that supported
some of my ideas and enhanced my ideas.

And
I think there is a turning point (for Hunter). After
his father dies, I thinks that is when Hunter
really does want to measure up to his father. He
wants to finish the job his father started. I
think he picks up the mantle from his father.

GH:
And there is a heroic quality. I mean, I don't
want to spoil the book. But in the aftermath of
the earthquake, he definitely has this heroic
aura. I think that's fair to say, wouldn't you?

Dalessandro:
Yes. I still believe in heroic figures. Not to support
cliches by any stretch, but I think there are people
who do heroic things every day in this life. Honest
cops that stand up against corruption. Honest
judges who refuse to back down. People who take
on criminal cases, or who defend people who are
not popular and who are innocent. And so you see
heroism every day. And I think a little dose of
old-fashioned heroism--if it's well done and
it's not cliched--I think can still be a very powerful
element in storytelling.

I
hope (Hunter) is not one-dimensional, because he starts
out--he is kind of afrivolous kid. He talks fast, he
answers his own questions, he's all over the place. And
when his father dies and the mantle is passed to
him, he becomes a different person. It changes
him, and it galvanizes him and focuses him.

There
is an old cliche that a boy becomes a man when a
man is needed. And I think that is what happens
to Hunter Fallon. People say that in fiction,
and I know this is true in film a lot, that we
look to see how the characters evolve. We look
to see how the adventure changes them. And I
think what happens truly changes the character
Hunter. I think he is a different person at the end than
he was at the beginning. And that's a good thing, I think.

GH:
And you might say that also about Annalisa. The
sense I got from her character is that she
enjoys being a newspaper reporter but that she
wants more than that--something with a stronger
sense of purpose, perhaps, or just more
excitement. Is that what you were aiming for?

Dalessandro:
Well, initially when she graduates from UC Berkeley,
Fremont Older's Evening Bulletin is sort of the beacon
of reform in San Francisco. And she graduates at the
top of her class at Berkeley in 1904, the same
year that Lincoln Steffens publishes "The Shame
of the Cities," which was a huge success and had
a profound effect on this country. It exposed
all the corruption in 24 major cities. And so
she wants to join the Evening Bulletin and become
a muckraking journalist, but they won't let her because
that's a man's job. Since she's fluent in Italian and
French, and since she wrote theater and opera reviews
for the Berkeley newspaper, she gets that job.

And
low and behold, there she is sitting next to
all the bad guys. And they are literally
bragging. They are so brazen and so blatant, and
they would literally drink in their opera
boxes, which you can't do now. They would talk
in their opera boxes, which you can't do now. And
eat in their opera boxes, which you can't do now. And
they would have parties and get drunk. And they would
brag about how much money they stole and who they bribed.
And their wives would complain about how much
the bribes had gone up.

So
(Annalisa) becomes the secret informant for the
corruption and graft hunters. And I think what
changes her is, she is a very independent woman.
Now, there is obviously a romance between her
and Hunter Fallon. But in the month after the
earthquake, they granted more marriage licenses
than they ever had at any time. And by making it that
they knew each other since childhood, and that she had
a schoolgirl infatuation with him, I felt that the romance
was organic. She is an independent woman who is
not looking to get married, not looking to get a
husband. And yet when he reappears, and she
sees what a marvelous person he has become, it
awakens the feelings that she had when she was
younger.

And
when he finds out how brave and heroic she was, that
she was his father's closest ally and only real friend--I
think it is very organic. I really was concerned about
that being a realistic romance, and not just some
sort of slapped-on Hollywood device. And so I
paid a lot of attention to making
that--hopefully--integrated into the story and
believable and functional.

GH:
There is a short passage in Annalisa's words that struck
me early in the book. She says, "It did not
have to happen. Good men and women, the
unlikeliest of heroes, might have stopped it.
The warning signs were everywhere." Now, I know
you are not saying that somebody could have stopped
the earthquake.

Dalessandro:
Not the earthquake but the fire. Not the
earthquake, of course. In 1905, the Fire
Underwriters Association--this is a true
story--issued a report that said, paraphrasing, "San
Francisco has violated every modern notion of building
and fire prevention. And a conflagration of epic proportions
is inevitable." That's a paraphrase.

And
the Fire Chief, Dennis Sullivan, was
ironically--horrifically--was the fourth
reported casualty. His fire station was shattered,
just like it says in the book. And he fell three stories
onto his head, lingered in a coma for three days. Dennis
Sullivan was the man who had a plan. He probably
would have tried to fix the water supply.

There
were lots of warnings. Dennis Sullivan had
issued hundreds of warnings, the fire
underwriters had issued hundreds of warnings.
Dennis Sullivan had fought the city administration,
to build a supplemental salt water system, which we now
have; to buy fire boats, which we now have; to do many,
many things that could have made a difference. If
not saving the entire city--that's always a real
question--there are sections of the city they
could have saved. The destruction would have
been less--and the death toll would have been
lower--had they listened to Dennis Sullivan and taken
the precautions that he had ordered and listened to the
warning signs. But once again, nobody listens because
they are too busy stealing the money.

GH:
And you suggest in the book--I mean, more than
suggest, you portray it--that the mayor and the
police chief conspire to keep the death toll
down, right?

Dalessandro:
Absolutely right. In 1907 the Board of
Supervisors of San Francisco set the official
death toll at 478, where it has stood for 98
years now. Gladys Hanson, the Archivist of the
City of San Francisco, has found the names of
3,400 dead. The number is easily double that figure.
So you're talking about close to 7,000 dead. There are
several historians who believe the actual figure could
be 10,000. It could be that high.

This
is the biggest lie and the biggest cover-up and
the biggest disaster in the United States. It's
unbelievable, uncoinscionable to me that this
could have happened.

GH:
More than 9/11, more than Pearl Harbor.

Dalessandro:
Greater death toll than September 11 by possibly three
times, yes. That's an astonishing figure when you stop
to think about it. The greatest death toll in
American history outside of war. The biggest
death toll we have now for a natural disaster is
the 1900 Galveston hurricane, which killed
6,000 people out of 29,000 residents of
Galveston. Right now that stands as the worst disaster
in terms of death toll in the United States. I believe
unequivocally that the San Francisco death toll was
higher.

GH:
Now, this business about General Funston
deciding that it was a good idea to make a
firebreak by blowing up buildings. That really
happened?

Dalessandro:
That actually happened. Frederick Funston hated
the city administration. When the earthquake
hit the general in charge, Adolphus Greely--I
believe he was in Seattle on the day that it
happened. And that left Funston in charge. That
was another disastrous circumstance. Greely,
when he returned, was appalled by what Funston did.

And
Funston's men--they were issued orders to shoot any
suspected looters. Well, unfortunately, scores
of soldiers got drunk and looted stores and
started shooting people. They shot several
hundred people. It could have been as high as
500. And the other thing they did was, because
two of the three main water lines were broken, they decided
to use dynamite to blow up buildings. Well, ask any
munitions expert, the effect of granulated
dynamite--black powder and gun cotton--on
wood-frame buildings, and they'll tell you. It
had been tried before, and it has never worked.
In order for that to work, you have to soak the
buildings with water, blow them up, and be ready to put
out fires. They had no water.

Dennis
Sullivan would have tried to fix the water. Dennis Sullivan
would have gotten pipes and pumps. The Army Corps of
Engineers at the Presidio--those guys once built a
pontoon bridge across a river in the Civil War
in 20 minutes. Those guys could have fixed the
water. There were things that could have been
done. The number of fires that were started by
the improper use of dynamite--and they even used
cannons at the end--was in the hundreds if not the
thousands. It spread the fire all over San Francisco.
It was disastrous.

GH:
I am not sure that that's really a well-known part of
the fire story.

Dalessandro:
It's not, it's not. So this leads me to perhaps another question,
if I could jump ahead of you. People ask me, why
fiction? Why didn't I just write another historical
piece? Well, because we learn from storytelling.
It's what Aristotle called the imitative arts. The
power of the imitative arts to put on the costume
and adapt the voice of a Julius Caesar or a Cleopatra
or an Abraham Lincoln, grabs people's attention because it
makes it more visceral, more emotional.

There
are dozens of books already written on the San
Francisco earthquake and fire, and all of these
facts are in those books, and nobody has ever
paid attention to them. You walk down the street
in San Francisco and stop a hundred people,
nobody knows this story. But when I wrote a novel
about it and created fictitious characters and reinterpreted
the real people, for some strange reason everybody is
starting to pay attention now. So that's just a
testimony, I think, to the power of
storytelling.

GH:
Now, do we know whether there was an actual argument
between (Mayor) Schmitz and (General) Funston
somewhere?

Dalessandro:
There was, there was. After General Funston
took charge of the city--I believe it was on the
second day, on the afternoon of the 19th (of
April) at about 3 o'clock--General Funston's men
were using cannons to blow up buildings on the
east side of Van Ness Avenue. And it was starting
fires. And Eugene Schmitz got in his car or his buggy--I
forget which, I think he had the car then--and he drove
out there.

And
nobody knows what the argument was about because it was
just the two of them. But the two men got into a screaming
match in the vestibule of St. Mary's Church on Van
Ness Avenue. And when Schmitz drove away,
Funston shut down the dynamiting. So we know
what this conversation was about.

Unfortunately, 12 hours later Funston started
the dynamiting and the demolition again. And it
started another fire that raced up Russian Hill
and down into North Beach. And that was one of
the worst fires. That was the one that trapped
all the people on the waterfront. That was the most disastrous
thing that Funston did.

There
were dozens of police officers who saw him do it. The
fire was already out on the east side of Van Ness Avenue;
Funston's men started the fire again. The police
officers who saw it happen were outraged. They
wanted to court-martial the son-of-a-bitch. They
wanted to shoot Funston.

GH:
Whatever happened to General Funston?

Dalessandro:
Everybody was afraid to start a big political witch hunt
and trial and everything. He almost got court-martialed.
William Howard Taft, who was the Secretary of War
and was soon to become the President of the
United States, said--and this is a quote--he
said, "It would take an act of Congress to save
Frederick Funston from the damage he did to the
United States Constitution." That was the
Secretary of War.

When
Adolphus Greely filed the report on Funston and the military,
they claimed that only nine people had been shot, and
that not one of them had been shot by soldiers. It
was an absolute lie. There are dozens and dozens
of eyewitnesses--honest, honorable people--who
saw the military shoot people.

GH:
Well, not only that, but you have scenes in the book
where there is the roar of the fire, and the people
can't hear them saying, "Stop." And you don't
know what the people are doing. Are they getting
food for their families? Are they getting axes
to help with the fire? So we don't know if any
of those people were guilty of looting.

Dalessandro:
That's exactly right. And the people who were doing the
shooting were tired and hungry. And some of them were
drunk. And then they franchised citizens' police.
They gave a thousand badges out and a thousand
guns. Military cadets--anybody who had any kind
of uniform who could possibly be deputized--were
given free reign to shoot anybody they thought
was looting.

There
is a story of an old man walking down Van Ness Avenue.
Some soldiers yelled at him to help them haul hoses for
the fire department. He was an old man who was an
Italian immigrant, spoke no English, had no idea
what they were talking about. A soldier ran him
through with a bayonet and killed him.

There
was a 15-year-old military cadet from Berkeley
who was bent over somebody, probably looking to
see if the man had any identification, to see if
the man needed help. A soldier shot him in the
back and killed him, killed a 15-year-old boy
who was a very proud cadet who had taken a ferry
boat over from Berkeley.

It's
insanity. Nowhere in any civilized nation is the right
to summary execution granted to everyone. Funston and
Schmitz and anybody that participated in that should
have been court-martialed and been shot themselves for
what they did.

GH:
In terms of the political boss.

Dalessandro:
Abe Rouf.

GH:
Yes. He goes by the name of Rolf in the book.

Dalessandro:
I called him Adam Rolf, because I changed his character.
Let me answer that question. He was a composite of
several different characters, that's why I
changed his name.

GH:
Well, I was going to ask you, there are very vivid and
disturbing scenes in the book where they take
advantage of the disorder to exact revenge on
people.

Dalessandro:
This, I believe, is a true story. What happened
was, Rudolph Spreckels was their sworn enemy.
They found out on that day--on the 17th, the day
before the earthquake--that he had put up
$100,000 to get Rouf and Schmitz. And in the
middle of the fire, the fire had not reached the
west side of Van Ness Avenue. Yet a neighbor saw Klaus Spreckels'
mansion start burning from the attic down. Somebody
went in the attic and set the house on fire. And
what I think happened was, Abe Rouf sent his
goons over to burn down Spreckels' house, and
they burned down the wrong house.

Afterward,
one of the men who turned against (Schmitz) was a man
named James Gallagher--Rouf's goon squad blew his house
and business up three times trying to kill him.
Their way of getting rid of their enemies was to
blow up their houses and burn their houses
down.

And
everybody thought that the Spreckels mansion had documents
in it. But they burned the wrong mansion down. That's
highly speculative. But I honestly believe that they
did. There was no other fire in any other mansion
anywhere around. And it started from the inside,
in the attic. A neighbor named James Stetson
saw it happen. So I honestly believe that they
went to burn down Rudolph Spreckels' mansion,
and they burned down Klaus Spreckels' mansion by
mistake.

GH:
A brother?

Dalessandro:
His father. Burned his father's mansion down by
mistake. They burned the wrong mansion.

GH:
And Rudolph Spreckels' wife really had a baby
outside?

Dalessandro:
There is a granddaughter. In 1949, when Eleanor
J. Spreckels died, her obituary in the San
Francisco Chronicle carried two big references
and descriptions to how she had given birth to a
baby on the lawn of her mansion as her house
burned down. Her granddaughter wrote a letter to the
San Francisco Chronicle disputing my portrayal of the
story. That story has been told by every historian I
have ever known, and it was in the San Francisco
Chronicle in a huge half-page obituary.

I
have never found a retraction or a
contradiction to that story other than from the
granddaughter. I have always hoped that my book
might lead us to discover--I honestly don't know
what the truth is. I can only tell you what the
Chronicle said, and what the story has been. I don't
know if Eleanor Spreckels' granddaughther's version of
the story is accurate. I don't know what the truth is.
I have always believed that the Eleanor J. Spreckels
story is true.

GH:
...I am fascinated by this character Scarface. Was that
a composite?

Dalessandro:
I made him up. I made up Scarface, the
character who is one of the killers in there.

GH:
He is just so ruthless.

Dalessandro:
He is ruthless. They were like that, they were like that.
I think I saw a description of a Norwegian shanghaier
who was very tall and had a scarred face. I don't
know anything about him other than his physical
description.

There
is a great book called "Shanghaiing in San Francisco" by
a merchant seaman named Bill Picklehoff, who is a waterfront
historian. And I think I took the physical
description from Picklehoff's book. But
(Scarface) and Shanghai Kelly are fictional
characters.

Shanghai
Kelly was a real character but his name was James Kelly.
I call this one John Kelly. There were probably 50
Irishmen--if not 500 Irishmen--who used the name
Shanghai Kelly on the Barbary Coast. The most
common name on the Barbary Coast was Kelly. And
tacking Shanghai in front of the name was almost
automatic.

GH:
Was that a sign of respect, do you think?

Dalessandro:
It's just like every Italian trying to claim they are
connected to the mob so they can be tough guys. If you
put Shanghai Kelly in front of your name, maybe
people will think you're a tough guy.

GH:
There is one other thing that occurs to me
about the interaction between the mayor and the
political boss and other businessmen. Was there
really a move afoot to have the Transcontinental
Railroad bypass Oakland and come into San
Francisco?

Dalessandro:
The war between Abe Rouf and the corrupt city
administration and the railroad was ongoing. And
whoever controlled the railroad controlled the
state of California. And they had long fancied
moving the Transcontinental Railroad from
Oakland to San Francisco. Because the railroad stopped
in Oakland, and then had to be moved by cargo ship. And
you had to unload it in San Francisco. It was very
expensive, and it also kept San Francisco from
controlling the Transcontinental Railroad.

The
Bay Bridge was originally supposed to be a
railroad bridge so that the train could go right
over it. The easiest place to send it across is
Dumbarton. It is a much easier bridge to build
that the Bay Bridge was. And they may not have
been trying to do that right on that specific
day. But it had long been the design of San Francisco
power brokers to controll the railroad by re-routing
it to San Francisco, absolutely.

GH:
What was happening in San Francisco was not
that different from other big cities, right?

Dalessandro:
Just on a bigger scale. Our corruption was white-collar,
theirs was blue-collar. Abe Rouf was a lawyer; he called
it honest graft because it was all legal fees.
They took corruption and graft to another level.
Boss Tweed and them--they plundered city hall.
In San Francisco they plundered the whole city.
Anybody that wanted anything in San
Francisco--building permits--they controlled it.

I
believe that the graft and corruption in San Francisco
was more sophisticated and more pervasive than in
any other city in the United States. Because
there was more money here. This was the great
money town. This was the wealthiest city per
capita in the United States. The power and money
was unimaginable.

GH:
And in the book at the end, you get the feeling that
the bad guys get their comeuppance eventually. But
the corruption didn't end because of the
earthquake. It kept going, right?

Dalessandro:
Well, it really cut into a lot of it. There was a reform
movement. The earthquake did have a big effect on
shanghaiing, on slave-trading. You would not see
that level of corruption again.

The
corruption probe had a pivotal effect. It accomplished what
it set out to do. It exposed the level of it, it started to
cut back on it. And it had a ripple effect through the
United States. It really did have a profound
effect.